Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a former co-editor of Explorations in Economic History. Leah Boustan is professor of economics and director of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. She is also co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and serves as co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Her prize-winning scholarly book, Competition in the Promised Land, examines the effect of the Great Black Migration from the rural South during and after World War II.
Boustan applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success, and reported the following:
As it turns out, page 99 in our book is focusing on the exceptions, not the rule. Most of Streets of Gold tells the optimistic story of the upward mobility of immigrants to the US – and especially their children – over more than a century of American history. We compare immigrants from the Ellis Island generation 100 years ago, most of whom hailed from Europe, to immigrants from around the world today.Learn more about Streets of Gold at the PublicAffairs website.
What we find surprised us: the children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those from poor families, do better economically than the children of U.S.-born residents. This pattern has held true for more than a century.
However, there is one group that we worry about, and that is children who arrive to the US without papers. These undocumented children can face numerous barriers is trying to gain an education and find a job. In the past, nearly all immigrants entered the US legally, whereas today around one-quarter of immigrants are undocumented.
Yet, the number of children of immigrants who are undocumented is far smaller (only around five percent) because any child who is born on US soil is automatically a US citizen. Page 99 in Streets of Gold picks up the story of this small but disadvantaged group and emphasizes that they might not enjoy the same upward trajectory as their peers.
One element of this page that is consistent with the rest of the book is the way that we weave together data and story-telling. Many of the findings in the book are based on ‘big data’ from millions of immigrant families. But we also introduce stories of immigrants whose experiences illuminate these broader trends. For example, on page 99, we tell the story of Margarita, an undocumented high-school graduate whose immigrant parents only received a fourth-grade education. Yet, Margarita finds herself working with her mother (“It’s kinda ridiculous,” she says, “why did I even go to school?”). This story was originally told to the sociologist Roberto Gonzales and we reproduce it here.
--Marshal Zeringue
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